A Good Family

Smith's (Highlights of the Off Season and Make-Believe Ballrooms) ironically titled novel concerns a blue-blooded family whose lives are shaped by an uncommunicative, emotionally distant father, and the sensual, sun-drenched, environment of a New England summer beach house to which the father flees to recover his lost childhood. Separated from his wife and their two children, narrator John ""Jam"" Knowles impulsively drives from his Midwestern home to St. James Island, where he breaks into the vacant, recently sold onetime family home to begin a ""retreat not only backwards but inward."" He remembers growing up with his idolized older brother, Tom, other brothers Jay and Sam and beautiful sister, Sarah. Almost 40 now, Jam confronts his memories, in the process questioning the unreliable nature of memory itself. Written with a lyrical elegance, the descriptions of the beach house and the natural world surrounding it are captured with exquisite precision. Central characters, however, particularly female ones, remain elusive, and Smith's meditation on family evasiveness lacks a solid structure. Ultimately, Jam's midlife struggle to reconcile his romanticized view of a past where everything seemed possible with both the mundane and tragic realities of his present life makes for a tale in which first-rate language is crushed beneath the weight of second-rate storytelling. (Sept.)